Len Shustek — Computer History Museum
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Len Shustek — Computer History Museum
A presentation recorded at Vintage Computer Festival West 2003, which was held at Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California. The event took place October 11-12, 2003 at the Computer History Museum.
Warning: This audio was recovered from a barely functioning videotape. It starts off rough but quickly gets better, though the levels are often low.
Automated transcript:
I'm the first in the whole series of white papers about why it is that Silicon Valley should have a computer museum.
And I decided to look around because I figured surely there are other computer museums, I'll just find one and copy it.
See what they did. So I went to the Smithsonian and I went in and looked around to try to find one and see if you can find it.
What I did find was the Washington Computer Museum and the fact that they had been started as a history museum and now we're in trouble and we're a history museum and also a kids museum.
And rather than reinvent my own, Gwen and Gordon Bell and I got together and said, "Let's
do something on the West Coast that starts the original mission of the computer museum."
So I joined the board specifically with the idea of creating this West Coast outpost.
This is from the newsletter in June of 1997 that says, "From the computer museum in Boston
saying, "The museum opens at the Computer History Center in Silicon Valley."
Again, on a personal note, in that same article there was a sort of profile of me, and the woman who is now my wife
happened to read that and said, "He sounds interesting. We'll find out about him."
And that's how we met, so for me the Computer Museum has been a wonderful dating service.
[laughter]
Starting from that time, we were financially independent.
Boston Museum would give us zero dollars. In fact, we raised all our own money locally,
Well, locally and in Boston, actually, both of us.
But from people who were interested in the history
of the city, we had to send back to Boston 25% of our income
as a tie, sort of overhead, to the mother ship.
But even despite that, beginning in 1996, we were in the black.
We had one employee and lots of volunteers, but that was fine.
The important thing was that we started moving the artifacts.
And in 1997, I arranged to get some decrepit old warehouses
at Muffle Field, mostly top-tech ways from, for free use.
And we paid to have probably 12 engine wheelers go up with
the stuff from Boston, take them across the country, and
deposit them in the old warehouse.
That's Gwen Bell, standing over there, supervising the
unloading of the truck part of the safe.
There are some in Boston who say, I stole it all,
that we didn't have the permission of the board
to do that.
And maybe that's true.
But on the other hand, I thought that that stuff was at risk.
By 1999, the Computer Museum in Boston was on its last legs.
When a nonprofit organization dissolves, legally,
they are required to distribute the asset to other nonprofits.
What we did is to divide the assets according to the mission.
So all of the stuff that the computer museum in Boston owned that had to do with computer history came here,
including ownership of the collection, and about a million dollars in money that had to be contributed in equity in the building that was to do with the mission.
That represents about 20% or 25% of the assets. The other 75% went into the museum of science.
So they got the walkthrough computer, the virtual fish tank, and all that other stuff.
of stuff. Actually, the ending was quite nice. The original mission got restarted here. The
kid stuff continued in the Museum of Science. They're very different missions. Every city
should have a kid museum. We have the Tech Library, the moratorium that teaches people,
kids and adults, about current high technology. We are a worldwide unique organization. We
are focused only on computer history. Our audience is primarily adults and above, although
well, certainly with high school students and maybe in the old school.
You know the rest of the story. We were going to build a building on Moffett Field.
It's part of a research park we are developing on 200 acres there.
We are going to be part of that research park. We've got an architect, an exhibit designer.
We have sketches of the buildings we were going to build.
And then stopped doing that because NASA was moving more slowly on that research park than suited us.
And because the economy tanked, there were suddenly real estate opportunities that made themselves available that weren't available before.
And the building was sitting in as a result of that. Of course, the building that hadn't been SGI's sales and marketing had bought it.
They had sold it to a developer, and we bought it from that developer for certainly less, far less than we could have paid to build an equipment.
By all accounts, it was a great deal.
A little bit about us.
This is sort of the commercial part.
Our mission is to preserve and to present for posterity the artifacts and stories of
the information age.
Our intention is, and we believe that we already have the best collection in the world, of
stuff.
And that stuff includes hardware, software, media, you know, poems, photographs, video,
all that stuff, documents.
documents. You don't see it, and I'll give you a private tour if you want, but we've got the whole back half of the building filled with stuff, including piles and piles of documents.
In some ways, the intellectual part of the preservation is not in the iron that sits on the floor under the storage. It's in the documents that sit behind it.
It's in the source code. It's in the drawings. It's in the plans. It's in the histories of the companies, of the people, the stories of the engineers, the stories of the marketing people.
of the marketing people. All of that stuff is the real intellectual contribution.
The exhibits are great, and we love doing exhibits, but the intellectual preservation
of the history is in all the other stuff.
We have 30,000 square feet allocated in this building to do physical exhibits.
We haven't done any of them yet.
Physical storage is not an exhibit. It's a warehouse.
It's not a fancier warehouse, but it's not an exhibit.
Our plan is to do web exhibits.
We have OneUp, which is an analog to physical storage, but also to allow deep access
including all of that paper and all that stuff.
It's just a calculation the other day that says we have about 15 million pages of paper.
Our long-term plan is to get all of those pages scanned and up on the web
so everybody can get access to them and search them.
More importantly, if you're trying to find something in 15 million pages, you're going to have to.
Google helps that, but in order for Google to work, you can't have it on a shelf.
You can't have it in a disk.
And of course programs. Lectures, conferences, the Fellows event, we're doing it in a couple of weeks.
We're inducting Tim Berners-Lee, Gordon Bell, and David Wheeler, the guy who invented the subroutine.
The subroutine is something you don't think had to have been invented. Back in 1946, it wasn't obvious how you get to execute a piece of code over there when you're executing over here.
David Wheeler indented the subject and the man is still alive. That shows you how close we are to the origins of the civilization.
So if you can, please come to the fellows. We do wonderful events. We do restorations. We did a 1620 a while ago.
We're starting up two new restorations now, 1401 and PDP-1. It's a new 1401, actually, that we're new to.
New to us, 1401, that we're getting in from Germany, which is in excellent condition.
We don't do a lot on the PCs because there's all this activity of folks like you who are doing that on the PCs.
And we love it and we encourage it. Help us get our PCs running too.
We're right now concentrating on the restorations in the sense of the harder stuff, the transistors and our big machines.
But we'll do the other machines too.
And we want to be a community resource. An example was helping DCF and being the umbrella organization that encouraged a lot of this activity.
So that's where we're headed.
A lot of people want to know the finances.
We have a target of raising $100 million, of which $50 million is to pay for this building
and the exhibit that we want to build inside of it.
And $50 million gets set aside and put in the bank as an endowment to make sure that this organization will survive forever.
The Boston Community Museum didn't do that.
And times got tough and donations went down and had nothing to fall back on.
And that's one of the ways in which we're trying very hard to do that.
From day one, every dollar we get into the capital campaign is split in half.
Half goes to the endowment, and half goes to the building and the big tax.
By the way, we borrowed money to build the space, to buy the space.
We get a $25 million top-screen bond.
We don't own this building. We got a mortgage to pay off.
And, uh, seeing that capital campaign, they let us pay off the money.
We're doing pretty well. We got $54 million in pledges of that $100 million,
and $24 million in cash actually collected.
But most of that happened before the economy came.
And we've been sort of holding our breath and waiting for things to get better along with everybody else.
And when the economy gets better, then nonprofits will begin to get money again.
And most of us don't have a lot.
These numbers sound big, but for the scale of operations we're doing, they're not that big.
We have a $2 million annual budget, almost all of which is privately contributed by individuals and corporations.
That sounds like a lot, but we have a staff of 15 full-time people, and this building can maintain, actually.
That doesn't go very far. And last fiscal year, we actually had to lay off some people to stay in the plan.
John Toole, our executive director and CEO, is in the back there.
He's the guy who gets to do the good stuff and the bad stuff.
So he's been wonderful. He's been with us for three years, and we couldn't survive him without him.
The other people we can't survive without are the hundreds of volunteers who do everything in here,
from the restoration, to working with the collection, to office work, to everything.
And fundraising. We've got wonderful volunteers working on our fundraising committees.
We couldn't survive and will not survive unless we continue to get the support of those volunteers.
So what are some of the challenges that are facing us? Well, the big one is the $46 million
left to rape. We've got to do that. Otherwise, we have to rise.
The other thing is that we've got this grand new building. People walk in here and expect
it to be a museum, and this isn't a museum. This is the building inside of which we're
going to build a museum. We have no museum exhibit. And some people have been disappointed
with that. And we have to deal with that expectation level, and we're trying, with signage and
videos and other things, to make clear to people that this is really alpha-fade. How
You know, how many times you say it, they don't believe it.
But this is not the museum yet in its real time.
Another issue that we're grappling with these days is software.
It is entirely within our mission to preserve software and the history of technology and the companies and people and all of that.
The only problem is we really don't know how to do it.
We don't know what it means to preserve software and what it is.
Is it source code? Is it object code? Is it videos of the users using it?
Is it audio, videotape interviews of the people who started the company?
Is it the sales history of the company?
The answer is it's all of that stuff.
When you preserve a piece of software, you're not just preserving the program that runs.
You're preserving a whole collection of other stuff.
And we're trying now, with Brady Booch's help, to make some progress in understanding what that is.
And we're actually going to be trying to target, as a test case, the 100 most important pieces of software, whatever that is,
whatever that is, and to collect all of the things I just described about those pieces
across there. And if that works, to go on and do it for a thousand most important pieces.
The other question, which we don't know how to answer yet, is how do you exhibit it? It's
easy to make interesting exhibits out of all that fun stuff and visible storage. It's just
interesting to look at. What do you look at in a software exhibit? You've got some boxes
on the wall there. This is visit time. Box on the wall. We really have to work hard to
figure out how to make exhibits for software that are interesting, and interesting to two
classes of people.
All of our exhibits have to appeal both to us, who are technologists who live and breathe
the different devices and understand all this stuff, and also to the more casual visitor
who is interested, is a computer user, but is not sort of inside it.
We have to make sure that everything we do for the public, who exhibits, has something
of interest to hold the board going.
And that's tough.
a committee right now, by Gardner Henry, who's on our board, to look at the whole software exhibit issue.
And one of the things we may do is to pick an area of the software theme room we intend to build
as a prototype, build an actual exhibit, get videos and all the interactive stuff that we want to do,
both to try out the software issues and also to show people what kind of exhibits to eventually unlock.
Another issue is that as we build the exhibits, the other half of this building that's filled with the warehouse exhibits,
the warehouse collections, is going to have to move somewhere else. Eventually, we're going to have to deal with the warehouse space.
Like all collecting museums, think of art museums, what's on display at any one time is only a small part of the collection.
So our 30,000 square feet of exhibit space will display 10 or 15 or 20 percent of our collection.
We've got to put the other 30 percent somewhere else.
The other thing is the third leg of this institution is to be a research institution, to really
use the collection to understand and study the history of this technology and to be public
in academic research.
That's a component that we will do in association with other institutions like Stanford and
the battery institute, but we haven't done a lot of that yet.
So that's the end of the commercial.
All of you are interested in preserving computer history, otherwise you wouldn't be here.
So continue doing what you're doing.
it's great, but also join us, support us, in the way of preserving the history of a
cool device, an important industry, fascinating people, and a force that is changing civilization.
Civilization will never again be the same, because of the invention you just created.
So thank you for coming. Enjoy BCF 6.0, and if you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them.
[Applause]
Yes?
[ Inaudible ]
Yeah. Writing history, I'm discovering, is very difficult.
And in fact, writing history is more difficult the closer it is to now.
Because the people are still alive and they can object to what you say.
Yeah, in fact, the whole issue of cryptology and the role of Colossus and ENIAC and the collective pockets
is very interesting. One of the things I'm trying to do, by the way, is that for the film ENIAC, they built
six exquisitely detailed reproductions of the original bombs, which means the four Colossus,
which is detailed under the cryptologies and the composition, to try to get one of those reproductions here.
here. Where is that stuff now? We should talk to you later. We should make sure that that
stuff gets preserved by us or by somebody else. The first rule, by the way, our first
is that stuff needs to be preserved.
I don't know if we can preserve it, but if not,
if somebody else preserves it, that's true.
[inaudible]
I know of him. I don't know a lot about him.
and being a first-party patent.
We had to build, we had to go out and do that.
We were going to get a total of $50,000.
And we hired and told the court that we would do a project of $30,000.
And we had to play a part in it.
And we built, basically, a government.
[INAUDIBLE]
It's really a fascinating history and I recommend Mike Williams' book here.
He's an expert in the mechanical age of computation and the early electronic age of computation.
There's lots of detailed mechanical descriptions or technical descriptions of the stuff in here.
The other thing which Doran Swade has produced is a privately printed, by the Museum of Science, book that describes
that describes basically the theory of operation for the Babbage different ventures.
Babbage never did that.
He drew the diagrams and said, "You build it and it'll work."
Doran Swade analyzed it all and has a 60-page document that describes exactly how a thing
works and what goes to what and how mechanisms were in there to avoid gears getting mad.
It's just a wonderful, if you're at all mechanically inclined, it's a wonderful document.
I don't know whether they sell copies of it.
Good question. We ought to get copies from them and sell it.
We're always looking for things to put in our gift though.
Well, the Museum of Science produced it. I don't know whether it's still in print.
I don't know whether they sell it or they just give it to people or not.
[unintelligible question]
There have been conferences on the history of programming languages.
The ITP History Center and the ACM have both done things.
There have been sporadic attempts.
Martin Campbell Kelly has written a book on software.
It tends to be more the history of the business of software, as opposed to the history of the technology.
I think that's harder to come by.
And not as well documented as the opportunity.
[unintelligible]
Absolutely. What a great question.
[unintelligible]
Working on restorations, working on the collection, being a tour guide, all of our docents are volunteers,
being a leader, working... Dave Batcock just walked in.
He's on the Volunteer Steering Committee and is one of our great and persistent volunteers.
He was the head of the 1620 Restoration Committee.
[unintelligible]
Whoa!
[unintelligible]
But they were just asking, is there any opportunity for volunteers?
The answer is absolutely.
Yes, we now have a part-time archivist who is working on getting our documents under control.
We are doing a test case right now. We have a huge collection that came to us about Stretch.
We're using that as a test case for how you scan, organize, catalog, and make available a document collection and archive.
Anybody who wants to help on that or related projects is welcome.
[no audio]
Talk to one of our curators. Send a message to daggs@spiceratg.org.
[no audio]
[INAUDIBLE]
We have a quite extensive library, actually, right above
us of books.
I'm personally trying to collect every book written
about the history of computing with the Inventor
Ale donated to the museum.
A more interesting question-- not a more interesting
question, but a related question is, what about the
books that are out of print?
Should anybody do anything of reprinting
some of the old stuff?
The answer is, I think, yes.
Babbage Institute has done a bunch of that.
They had a whole reprint series of 20 or so books.
Digital Equipment Corporation actually had Digital Press.
Gordon Belden was responsible for this, where they
reprinted a lot of the early important books that were out
of print and uneventful.
That may become less necessary now that you can just scan a
copy and put it in the web.
But yes, we're trying, certainly, to keep a copy in
our archive of everything that's relevant.
And the other interesting question is how then do you
make that available to the world.
[audience question]
Yeah, it is an easier problem and doesn't run into the copyright issue.
We're full face on in the whole issue of what about copyrights.
For the 1620 project, we were actually getting IBM to release the copyrights for all the 1620 languages.
We were able to scan that stuff and put it on our website.
I'm just going to try to do that for the 1401 as well.
In general, Raj Reddy has estimated that there are 100 million books in print and 97% of them are still under active copyright.
Yet only 3% of them are in print. So there are 95% of the world's books which are not in print but under active copyright.
[Inaudible ]
There are people like Brewster, software by the way has the same problems, there are people like Brewster
the Internet Archive who are actually trying to approach the legislative side to see whether
we can make some changes to the laws to make preservation sort of evade the copyright laws,
to make an exception for it.
Well, somebody owns the assets of that company.
Is that -- maybe, maybe not.
Any other questions?
Thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of your day.
[APPLAUSE]
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